Generally, scholarly research is a formal work undertaken to gain knowledge of various subjects, aspects and facts in order to solve a new or existing problem. A research work may provide a detailed insight on any subject of interest to the researcher. The process of performing research work may include steps such as; Identification of research problem, Literature review, Specifying the purpose of research, Determine specific research questions or hypotheses, Information collection, Analyzing and interpreting the information and Reporting and evaluating research. Hence, a researcher requires up to date information on research being conducted in one's field of specialization.
During the research process, a researcher may use various primary sources and methods of information collection through surveys, questionnaires and so on. The researcher may also use secondary data obtained from previously done research work, facts and figures available on the Internet and so on. Hence, the researcher has to search for the relevant content in various sources of information to get the required details.
Presently, the most common source for performing a search is the internet. For the purposes of performing a search, a researcher has to efficiently select and use certain keywords that are relevant to his study of interest. Due to insufficient knowledge and lack of hands-on experience on online searching techniques, search processes become complicated tasks for the researchers. Also, ever increasing amounts of information generated and collected on the Internet increases the time spent by a researcher in just sorting through large volumes of results returned for each search query. Many such queries may be necessary to collect relevant research citations, papers, reports, and other data sources as a part of the background research literature collection process. Choosing and saving the relevant output results of each search query requires large amounts of researcher's time, thereby handicapping the researcher's ability in considering all the relevant items displayed for each search query.
Unlike regular and general searches, keywords used by researchers and academicians for research purposes need to be appropriate in order to extract relevant and intended/sought for search results. It is a known fact that many research papers which may be useful to researchers may not have been published in professional journals yet or such research may be still in progress as different types of working papers presented in conferences or uploaded on to the Internet through faculty personal pages, research workshops, university or research institution working paper forums, etc. These papers may be very valuable for researchers working in that area of in depth specializations. More commonly used academic research databases do not include most of such research works. Also, with keyword search methods and techniques commonly used in user initiated searches, it is difficult to access research that has not yet appeared in peer reviewed and other journals.